On 1/2/11 at 4:54 AM, dave at removedbailey.co.uk (David Bailey) wrote:
>Procedural code lets anyone, 'hack' any process they desire, whereas
>functional code becomes conceptually harder and harder as
>complications set it - at least to those of us who spent many years
>writing code in C and Fortran!
>As regards aesthetics, I'd say that sometimes functional code looks
>much more elegant than the procedural equivalent, but other times,
>it just looks obscure!
I think the obscurity of functional code is largely a matter of
what you get used to. When I first started with Mathematica, I
only used procedural code since this is what I had been used to
with C or C++. But it has been years since I've done anything in
C or C++. I now use Mathematica on a daily basis and it has been
so long since I've used procedural code I have to refer to the
documentation to check syntax. I am now at the point where I
find it much easier to understand functional Mathematica code
than procedural Mathematica code.